Peter Christy

What a Week

Paul Maritz must have had a reasonable idea of what he was getting into. In most aspects VMWorld was been a smashing success -- large and enthusiastic crowds, a big ecosystem pavilion. Paul did an excellent job on the keynote considering he had been on the job for all of 10 weeks (he was blessed by the fact that Diane Green was truly an awful public speaker so the hurdle was low) that dovetailed nicely with CTO Steve Herrod's excellent technical keynote the next day. Maritz sounded more like the leader of a $2B software company than VMware. The plans sound like business plans: (1) Paul admits they are really a platform vendor and they talk about a Data Center OS, (2) he put a stake in the ground that the Cloud was going to be a real business and (3) that they were getting serious about VDI (now branded as vClient). All of this makes sense if you're trying to answer the question "How will VMware make money?" (the question that Diane never wanted to talk about it). On the other hand, with the collapse of the "virtualization" reality distortion field came a further (and I'm sure painful) deflation of the stock, taking it down well under the initial IPO price. Some of the commentators apparently never realized that VMware really does compete with the big boys. Oh well...

Microsoft Bangs the Virtual Drum

In what is bound to be only the first round in loud and endless rolling thunder, Microsoft officially released virtualization. Nothing earthshaking was new. The standalone bare metal hypervisor was released earlier than most expected. Hyper-VMotion was demonstrated and seemed to work. Mostly I think it was Microsoft starting to show some of their powerful assets like customers, business partners and the ability to spend $100M on marketing (or whatever) when they want to. As we've been saying for some time -- Game on! VMware better forget the healthy and eco-friendly lifestyle and learn quickly to be street fighters (maybe Oracle will buy VMW -- that would make the game fun!)

Get on the Right Curve!

A treat at the Citrix analyst meeting was talk from Geir Ramleth, the Bechtel CIO and a Citrix customer. Ramleth described the fascinating saga of Bechtel's modernization of their IT infrastructure. As Bechtel was contemplating how to get from where they were to where they wanted to be, they came to the realization that big Internet players bought bandwidth on an entirely different price scale from giant Bechtel, and that Internet storage providers had a cost structure that bore no resemblance to the enterprise storage prices they paid. Geir reasoned that almost all of the VC IT investment was aimed at the consumer side (and presumably the innovation) and that if he wanted to really make progress he needed somehow to get off the enterprise IT curve and onto the consumer Internet curve. The details are pretty interesting but we're sworn to secrecy.

Cisco and Hypervisors

Cisco announced some of the anticipated fruits of their partnership with VMware and their acquisition of Nuova (remember that Nuova's CTO Ed Bugnion was a VMware founder). As Ed says so well, server virtualization didn't break the applications but it certainly broke the infrastructure. A switch and network management system that can't see the virtual NIC's on virtual servers isn't very useful, so in this tranche of announcements Cisco remedied a lot of those problems with the introduction of a distributed virtual switch (software) that the physical Cisco data center switches can see and manage. It's an important step forward for virtual infrastructure, although we suspect just the first step.

Virtualization at 50,000 feet

So here's a view on what's happening (the proverbial "big picture"): (1) MS has successfully queered the virtualization price structure making VMW offer the hypervisor for free. (2) That makes it clear that VMW isn't going to grow just selling the technology -- it's the higher level systems and management tools that you'll get paid for -- so they have repositioned themselves as a data center O/S company. (3) But that means that they are in a sense admitting that MS has been right all along -- virtualization is important but it's only one piece of a puzzle -- it makes VMW's position against MS scarier. (4) The vision is now clearer -- we want services that can be moved flexibly throughout a resource fabric (enterprise data center and cloud service provider) -- and we want an individual to be able to get to his personal (virtual) system from more or less anywhere and anything in the world. This is the attractive future that virtualization promises. The problem is that compared to virtualizing a single server this is really difficult system engineering and is going to take a lot of work to accomplish. Progress is going to start to slow down fairly dramatically as we collectively grind on these really hard problems. Don't get impatient. Sit down, watch a baseball game, smell the roses.

Riverbed 2.0

At their analyst meeting in SF last week, Riverbed gave the first public glimpse into their next big thing, which in fact is a pretty interesting and possibly quite big thing -- Atlas. Atlas is a new family of appliances that can be used in conjunction with the existing Riverbed appliances to create a "de-duplication" file system. Riverbed's SDR "compression" technology is used to find redundancy in stored files and "compress" that redundancy out. The product is just entering early customer trials now and isn't expected to be made generally available until 2009 but this obviously represents a quite bold step into some very new markets and given that one interesting application would be to build a distributed file system it isn't unrelated to the current business. The interesting Mr. McCanne strikes again!

The Microsoft POLP

 Despite the name this isn't what might be found by Steve Ballmer's most recent colonoscopy. Instead it stands for Protocol Optimization Licensing Program and it's how Cisco, Riverbed and others work with Microsoft and develop optimization solutions for key Microsoft protocols (e.g., MAPI) without the risk (technical and legal) of having to reverse engineering the base protocol. Riverbed's recent press release talked of this as a "partnership" but that's probably not quite the right word to use (in fact these protocol license documents explicitly say they aren't partnerships because that has specific meaning in Washington State commercial law). Although Microsoft provides access to these protocols they still pretty much control things because of the many patents underlying the protocols. Understanding the protocol doesn't mean you can implement it (because of the patents) nor build "derivative" works (what has to be done for WAN optimization). That only comes with an explicit license agreement (e.g., POLP) that includes a nominal payment and more to the point also gives MS forgiveness on any patent violation they might have doing their own version of the optimized protocol (cross licensing). I'm not sure I would call that a "partnership."

Fiddling While Rome Burns (one more time)

For years I have railed about the inadequate industry cooperation when it came to the mitigation of spam (or failure to do so). I know that it's not a simple issue. The industry participants are nearly as callus or evil as the outcome might suggest. Solving the problems requires creating the right economic (carrot or stick) for the parties that have to do the work and that's not necessarily easy. For example, many ISP's have technology in house by which they could mitigate BotNet activity if informed which IP number are Bot's. But doing so would only increase the customer support costs for the ISP so they aren't motivated to do so since they already have trouble making any money. On the other hand, if we don't solve the problem the future looks very scary (the present is scary enough) as this NTY story about Russian organized crime suggests. Still feels like Fiddlin' if you ask me!

Networks Heat Up

A notable year in high-performance networking has turned a technical conference into a very relevant discussion of important commercial issues. Stanford's 16th Hot Interconnects Symposium (formally an IEEE meeting -- 27/8 August) has what looks like some remarkably interesting discussions including a keynote and two panels on Wall Street networking, a talk by Mendel Rosenblum on Virtualization and Data Center Networking, and a keynote and technical papers on how to deal with all the cores in tomorrow's multicore CPU's (see http://www.hoti.org/hoti16/program/ ). 2008 is the year when 10G networking started to be competitive, virtualization swept the data center, multicore impact started to be felt in earnest, and when the importance of computational intensive finance became all too clear. Even if the technology of on-chip optical interconnect isn't what lights your personal fire, you might very well find something important at this Stanford meeting.